Louis Austin and the Carolina Times

A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle

Jerry Gershenhorn

Publication Year: 2018

Louis Austin (1898–1971) came of age at the nadir of the Jim Crow era and became a transformative leader of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina. From 1927 to 1971, he published and edited the Carolina Times, the preeminent black newspaper in the state. He used the power of the press to voice the anger of black Carolinians, and to turn that anger into action in a forty-year crusade for freedom.

In this biography, Jerry Gershenhorn chronicles Austin's career as a journalist and activist, highlighting his work during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar civil rights movement. Austin helped pioneer radical tactics during the Depression, including antisegregation lawsuits, boycotts of segregated movie theaters and white-owned stores that refused to hire black workers, and African American voting rights campaigns based on political participation in the Democratic Party. In examining Austin's life, Gershenhorn narrates the story of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a new vantage point, shedding new light on the vitality of black protest and the black press in the twentieth century.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

In 1933, a young North Carolinian man named Thomas Raymond Hocutt
dreamed of becoming a pharmacist. As he completed his undergraduate
studies at Durham’s North Carolina College for Negroes, he was forced to
reckon with the fact that only the all-white University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill (UNC) housed a pharmacy program. At the very same time,
three young civil rights activists, two attorneys and a journalist, were searching
for a brave African American who would agree to challenge Jim Crow...

Chapter One.
No Man Is Your Captain: The Making of an Agitator

One day, when he was about seven years old, a few years after the turn of the
twentieth century, Louis Austin grabbed his shoeshine brush and approached
a white man who had just entered his father’s barber shop. Mimicking some
of the older boys, young Louis said to the customer, “Shine, capt’n, Shine,
capt’n.” Louis’s father, William, abruptly stopped sharpening his straight razor
before giving a customer a shave, turned to his oldest child, and reprimanded
him, “Son, never let me hear you say those words again. No man is your...

Chapter Two. We Have Got to Fight for Our Rights: Advocacy Journalism in the Great Depression

Once he took the reins, Austin quickly transformed the Carolina Times into a
bullhorn for racial justice and equality. He declared, “The Carolina Times is
the mouthpiece of Negro Durham.”1 A devout Christian, Austin believed that
it was his moral duty to expose the suffering and injustice doled out to African
Americans and to wage war against those who denied African Americans
the rights and opportunities enjoyed by white Americans.2 For Austin, like
for many African Americans, the message of the Bible was a message of...

Chapter Three. Double V in North Carolina: The Struggle for Racial Equality during World War II

During World War II, African American activists formulated a strategy that
the Pittsburgh Courier called the Double V.1 Even before the Courier first publicized
the Double V slogan in February 1942, black activists and newspapers
were already articulating a dual strategy in which blacks would fight for victory
abroad against the Axis Powers while fighting for victory at home against
the forces of white supremacy and racial oppression. The black press, according
to one authority, the most powerful institution in the black community,...

Photographs

Chapter Four. Segregation Must and Will Be Destroyed: The Black Freedom Struggle, 1945–1954

By the time World War II ended in 1945, Louis Austin had been a leading activist
and voice for racial justice for almost two decades. During the first postwar
decade, Austin’s editorials continued to be forthright and resolute. This
gutsy journalist, now in his late forties, led voter registration campaigns, ran
for public office, advocated integration of higher education in the courts, lobbied
for equal funding for black schools, demanded economic opportunity
for African Americans, and denounced police brutality and racial injustice in...

As the Brown decision ushered in the era of the modern civil rights movement,
black newspapers continued to play an important role in the freedom
struggle. The black press’s employment of advocacy journalism had played a
crucial role in the battle for civil rights during the preceding decades.1 And in
North Carolina, for almost three decades, Louis Austin and the Carolina
Times had helped build the foundation for the black freedom movement of
the 1950s and 1960s....

Chapter Six.
The Gospel of the Sit-In: Direct Action, 1960–1965

On February 1, 1960, three years after the Royal Ice Cream sit-in, four black
first-year students from historically black A&T College in Greensboro staged
a sit-in at the lunch counter of the downtown Woolworth’s, an action that
transformed the civil rights movement. Austin was quick to support the A&T
students, as in Osha Gray Davidson’s words, he “preached the gospel of the
sit-in that Saturday.”1 Austin pronounced the student protest “the most encouraging
incident that has occurred within the past five years.” He praised...

Chapter Seven.
It Was a Wonder I Wasn’t Lynched: A Freedom Fighter till the End, 1966–1971

While the passage of landmark civil rights legislation had partially redeemed
the long years of struggle, Louis Austin knew that African Americans’ fight
for racial justice was far from over. As he began his fifth decade publishing
the Carolina Times, Austin continued to attack racial oppression, which remained
pervasive, despite the victories won by the efforts of thousands of
black freedom fighters. In March 1966, Austin gave voice to the frustration
felt by many African Americans with the failure of the justice system to deal...

Epilogue

Austin’s death dealt a huge blow to his immediate family, to his Carolina Times
family, to African Americans, and to freedom fighters in Durham and
throughout the state. But Austin’s wife, Stella Austin, and their daughter, Vivian
Edmonds, with the support of the employees at the newspaper as well as
the paper’s subscribers, would not let the paper die with its publisher. They
were committed to see the Times sustain Louis Austin’s legacy of speaking
truth to power.1 Stella Austin, who had retired four years earlier from...

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